The Presidency: Time for Some Decorum

By Hugh Sidey

Let George Bush wander a few miles from the Oval Office or the womb of Air Force One, and he is apt to go native in search of the great American middle class. He has been sighted in a Frederick, Md., JCPenney store buying socks and recorded in New Hampshire's political precincts slanging from the stump about frogs without wings and liberals jumping on an unspecified part of his anatomy. Last week he uncovered a cache of supermarket checkout gear at the Orlando convention of the National Grocers Association. The pampered and protected President was dazzled. Supermarket habitues have been using the stuff for more than a decade.

After Bush's latest foray, the President's subterranean political network in Washington sent a message: get him back up on his presidential pedestal. There remains in this nation despite hard times a huge reservoir of regard and respect for the presidency. Anyone inside or outside the White House who tampers with it diminishes himself.

"Where is Roger Ailes when we need him?" worried one partisan, who remembered Ailes in the 1988 campaign, shouting into a telephone at then-Vice President Bush, "If you are going to wear those silly short-sleeved shirts, put on a coat. If you don't wear a coat, get a plastic envelope for your pocket and fill it with pencils, so you look like a real clerk -- and stop flapping your arms."

Ailes claims to be out of presidential politics and, in any case, political handlers don't treat sitting Presidents the way they do mere aspirants. By all counts, Bush's goofy moments stem from his own unchecked impulses.

Richard Nixon has noticed the trend, and in several gatherings of his old campaign cronies, he has spoken up. "Bush should not attack or defend in this campaign," Nixon declares. "He is no good at it because it is not in his nature. He is too polite. When he tries, he sounds phony. His greatest strength is being presidential."

But if Bush has lost a little luster of late, he probably gained some of it back last week when Colorado's bumptious Democratic Governor Roy Romer, in the White House East Room, upbraided the President for his budget and commandeered White House cameras to claim that Bush was making a political pitch. Well now, agree with Bush's budget or not, the President does have a constitutional duty to present his plan. A lapse of good manners is hardly an answer.

In October the 200th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the White House will be marked with a series of seminars about the stately old building, the dignified and durable symbol of this government. George Washington kept close watch over its planning and design, wanting a monument that reflected the majesty of the office. And Washington's insistence that the presidency be founded on the highest dimensions and standards of human character has been the ideal for more than two centuries. When the first President was 15 years old, he compiled for himself 102 "Rules of Civility," which he put in his notebook. Among them: "Shake not the head, feet or legs, roll not the eye, lift not one eyebrow higher than the other; wry not the mouth." Bush -- and his rivals -- should read it.